On 19.02.2009, at 01:33, Norbert Bollow wrote:
roger@mgz.ch wrote:
Im wondering why this guy taking a big risk in creating those pages
somebody must have triggered that sickness.
I looked into this a bit back in August last year, seeking to
understand what got those guys so upset. IMO the actions of
those guys in creating those pages, and protesting in other
(at least in part also illegal) ways, are unjustifiable.
However that does not at all justify that judge's decision to push
Switzerland onto the slippery slope of censorship.
I'm not in a position to comment on the "questionable content". I'm neither a lawyer to say if its illegal or not, nor have I personally even looked at the site yet. Its none of my business.
One point to discuss is however that the judge says its impossible to take the site down because its hosted in USA. This is ridiculous argument to me. They have agreements with USA to follow up on crime (Rechtshilfeverfahren). It might be a lot of paperwork and it might be boring and time consuming, but is that OUR problem if their agreements with USA are slow and difficult? No its not. Secondly, apparently they know very well who owns that website and who has put it up as it happened before. The easiest would be to take that guy to take it down himself. But that has not even been attempted it seems.
To me it sounds like the judge has no experience in the internet and the police often refers to some "training session" where the police guys get told how to use tools like "whois". Those training sessions don't make police officers experts in the internet.
I can tell you from another case which happened to myself that the police today is unable to follow up on internet crime by large. In my case this has costed me a very large sum in lost sales. Its no fun. The police has a big information gap when it comes to the internet. They are not able to react quickly enough, they don't have the experience. This is the biggest threat of crime these days. If I would start a war these days, I would not use bombs or tanks. The countries are much more vulnerable on the internet. Our legal framework has not adapted to the high speed threats of the internet. This is the basic problem we are facing.
Now there's only one way to tackle this problem. WE, as experts in the field, have to get involved. We must teach them, we must help politicians take the right decision. Otherwise we will be put into the line of fire and we can only loose.
Interesting is the position of the european union:
(from a discussion around the court case of ThePirateBay which occurs this week)
“EU directive 2000/31/EG says that he who provides an information service is not responsible for the information that is being transferred. In order to be responsible, the service provider must initiate the transfer. But the admins of The Pirate Bay don’t initiate transfers. It’s the users that do and they are physically identifiable people. "
I think its important to work this point out..
Swiss law wants to stay in line with European Union, especially in telecommunications and regulatory issues (which makes a lot of sense).
there are open points,
how to finance the equipment.
*If* that court order turns ends up being binding, my understanding is
that the equipment will have to be financed just like all other
equipment that is required for operating an ISP in accordance with
the needs of the customers and the requirements of the law.
I agree if this is in the law that everyone has to do it that will apply to everyone.
If a court order however picks a few ISP's only and orders it to them, then we should be able to reclaim the costs as its not required by everyone and those ISP's are totally uninvolved. Why would Swisscom and Sunrise not be forced to do this?
How to handle an finance an ISP get sued by an client for censorship ?
If the ISP blocks *only* websites for which a court order to
block them has been served on the ISP, it should be possible to
get any complaint dismissed very inexpensively by pointing to that
court order.
This implies IMO that ISPs should avoid IP-based blocking. I
would suggest to configure, in the nameservers which you make
available to your customers, false authoritative DNS responses for any
domains that you're required to block. Point them to a page which
instructs visitors to direct any enquiries regarding the reasons
for the block to the court which ordered the block, quoting the case
number.
What about an ISP who doesn't run his own DNS servers and leaves that to the customers?
Of course this is easy to circumvent for any knowledgable person,
but it fulfils the requirement, and it's cheap and relatively
transparent.
And ridiculous too.
Is the commanding Court legitimated to force all swiss ISP to follow this
order ?
This is unclear to me as well.
This is very important to know
Another question is this: What happens when one of those domain
names expires and someone else registers it and uses it for some quite
honorable purpose? That (now-suspended) court order does not appear
to foresee any way in which the censorship order could be challenged
at a later time on the grounds that the censorship demand no longer
has any legal basis.
Blocking a domain name is not blocking the page.
think of
what does SIUG say to that topic ? there sems to be no activity at all.
I have a few hours ago put up copies of the two recent court orders
(without the lists of ISP contact person names, which IMO raise some
privacy concerns) together with a very minimal comment up on siug.ch
If you're interested in seeing SIUG take further action, such as
publishing a position statement that explains why such censorship
is a bad idea, or organizing public events (e.g. a podium discussion)
on this topic, well, you're welcome to volunteer to do the necessary
work, or pay someone to do it. :-)
Best regards
Norbert Bollow,
president of SIUG
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To summarize: we MUST react or we might let further such cases come in daily.
Andreas Fink
Fink Consulting GmbH
Global Networks Schweiz AG
BebbiCell AG
IceCell ehf
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